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I won’t go into the reasons why you might want Google Chrome on your Mac in the first place, or the reasons you might have for wanting to remove it other than to say this app is a good example of the sort of junk that can get let behind if your way of uninstalling apps is simply to drag them to the trash.

This is just a short post for those who don’t have an OS X application uninstaller (like CleanApp) and who may want to remove as many traces of Google Chrome as they can from their Mac. So without further ado, here is the list of files that you will need to look out for and remove. Note than in the list you will need to replace <username> with whatever id you use when logging on to your Mac.

If you use Little Snitch or Hands Off! then you can also go and delete any rules relating to Google Chrome for good measure, such as:

Google Chrome.app

GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent.app

ksurl

The only thing to watch for is if you are using other Google software on your Mac such as Picasa or Google Earth as these might be sharing some of the common folders and agents. If in doubt, leave it alone is always a good motto!

The air is thick with rumours and predictions. What will be in Lion, iOS5 and iCloud? Everyone is having their say and it makes for interesting reading even if most of the commentators are guessing the same things. Me? I haven’t a clue! I merely read and digest the Apple news and I’m not nearly close enough to the game to figure out what’s going on. That’s why I’m wishing for a coupe of new features for Apple’s desktop OS that I almost certainly won’t see.

The first is aimed at dealing with the new upsurge in Mac malware, and something I’ve mentioned before. A toggle switch to prevent apps from being installed from anywhere other than the Mac App Store (MAS). The idea is really simple. There’s a System Preference that says ‘Only allow app installs from the Mac App Store’ which by default is set to yes. If you try to launch an app or run an mkpg with this switch set to yes, you get a message telling you you can’t run it. The message could be more explicit and warn you about the dangers of unsolicited software but the idea is to stop apps getting installed and run when you didn’t actually go looking for the app to install in the first place. For ‘power users’ who need to frequently install software to test out, or who are perhaps less likely to succumb to a phishing attack, well they can disable this setting and just carry on as before. Everyone’s happy, job done.

And while we’re at it, Safari could have the ‘open safe files’ setting disabled and given similar warnings. Now of course there are subtle variations on how this ‘Only allow app installs from the Mac App Store’ feature would work, but you get the general idea.

On to my second … well I was going to bemoan the fact that there’s no Whole Disk Encryption (WDE) in Snow Leopard, and no news of it appearing in Lion. That’s all changed! Lion will feature FileVault 2 which will support full disk encryption. No more needing PGP for Mac! Here’s the low down on the Apple website – http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/features.html#filevault2

One out of two… it’s a good start.

The first of many?

By the way… I have recently started dabbling in the world of iOS apps. Now it’s a long time since I was a programmer (late 80’s I think) so someone else is taking care of that aspect of things, but there’s a lot more to getting your app into the iTunes App Store, some of which can get quite confusing or just frustrating. I’m aiming to write a few articles about the experience in the hope that it’ll help someone in the future, but if you want to see the fruits of our labours and the little ‘entertaining’? app we created, then pop over to iTunes and look for TodUhr or paste this link http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/toduhr/id439571992?mt=8 in to your browser. Disclosure – the app costs a few pennies or cents depending on where you live… all of which is gratefully received (after Apple takes their 30%) to help cover the $99 developers fee that is Apple’s cost of entry to it’s playground.

MacDefender (and now a few variants) has been making a name for itself recently. The first piece of Mac malware that’s managed to catch people who weren’t downloading some cracked application or other. By all accounts the victim merely needed to visit one of several websites that had been compromised with malicious code. A pop-up appears saying their computer is infected and they are prompted to download and install some bogus software that demands credit card details before supposedly removing the infection.

MacDefender

Now I’ve been using PCs and Macs for longer than I care to mention and while I like to think that I would never have fallen prey to this ‘scare & pay-up’ tactic, I actually know several friends and family members who would have. They are trusting people. They are people who are well aware of the prevalence of malware on the Windows platform, having typically been Windows users themselves previously. They have heard the mantra of protecting yourself by having good anti-malware software installed, so when they see the warning they think it’s entirely credible… even for a Mac user.

But there’s something else that many of these people do, or rather don’t do and that’s to frequently install 3rd party apps. I know at least 4 Mac users for whom I have installed iWork, Office for Mac or an iLife upgrade and that’s it. That’s all they use. They do email, they shop online, they write a few documents or spreadsheets, they work with photos or movies in iLife and they use iTunes and maybe download an iOS app or two. As for Mac OS X software, they don’t really have a need to step beyond the few apps that Apple gives them and they’re perfectly happy with that. Maybe once or twice I might get a call asking if I could recommend an app such as a family tree program or something, but that’s about it.

I’m pretty certain that I’m not unique. There must be thousands, perhaps millions of Mac users out there who really do have modest requirements or who don’t have the urge to experiment with different apps all the time, and it’s for those people for whom I had an idea…

A System Preference, perhaps under the Accounts preference pane, that says:

‘Only allow software installs from the Mac App Store: Yes/No’ (with the default being set to No).

So what does this do? Well the idea is that it prevents a 3rd party app from being installed and run if it hasn’t come from the Mac App Store. The App Store is curated by Apple, so it’s a trusted source of software that can be installed, and software from any other source gets stopped in it’s tracks. As for the mechanism for how it prevents 3rd party software being used, well that’s down to the clever guys. They could use certificates, some sort of file system checks, etc., I’m sure there are many ways this could be achieved. What’s more, you could even attach a timer to the ‘Yes’ option, with a slider that goes from 5 minutes to ‘indefinitely’ (with appropriate warnings for leaving it set).

By now there’s probably a few people who would be up in arms against this idea, saying it’s half way towards a walled garden for Mac users rather like iOS users, but then that’s exactly the point. It is only half way and it still gives people like me who like to tinker, the option to do so, in the full knowledge that I think I know what I’m doing. For what I suspect is a great many people, it would add that extra level of protection along the lines of – you only ever install software when you have actually gone out looking for software to install.

Now I’m sure that malware writers could get creative, and instead of popping up a warning saying your Mac is infected, they could easily craft a window that instead mimics the built-in Software Update window and says something like ‘iLife 2011-05-25 Security Update. Click here to install’. Indeed that might catch a lot more people after all, who doesn’t have iLife installed? This is where Apple gets creative in finding a way to block these, e.g. by preventing access to the ‘Install 3rd party apps’ option except by approved services (like Software Update) or via the GUI itself. What’s more, it would probably be a good idea to show this setting to any new Mac user to try and prevent a deluge of calls to Apple Care saying “Help, I can’t install something”. Perhaps a message that greets the user saying “Installation of 3rd party software is currently disabled (recommended). Do you wish to change this setting?”.

At the end of the day I’m talking about mindsets here. There are those who like to fiddle, who regularly install apps, who know how things work, etc., and they can switch the option off confident that they can probably use their wits to avoid getting infected. But then there are those who don’t really care for that sort of thing. They are perfectly fine using the apps they have, and installing software is a rare event where they usually ask a friend for help anyway. It’s this second group of people for whom prevention is probably better than cure.

Is this one of my more mad ideas? Have I got it completely wrong? Who knows. What I do know is that the one family member I have who still uses Windows, generates more “Help it’s broken” calls to me than all my Mac-using friends and family added together. Still love ’em to bits though!

The longer you own your Mac, the more software you’ll most likely load onto it and as you do so you’ll encounter more applications that want to load when your system boots up. Now if you’re one of these people who only ever ‘sleeps’ your Mac then this isn’t so much of a problem. Everything that’s in memory gets written to disk and just reloaded back to memory when you wake the machine up. However, there are those among us who do actually power off their Macs for whatever reason, and when you have a lot of applications all wanting to load on startup, then the boot process can leave you tapping your fingers while the Mac diligently loads up all these programs.

Sure, you know all the applications that launch on startup can be found in your ‘Login Items’ under your account in the System Preferences, and common sense says that if you just remove them from the list then your Mac will boot quicker. Problem there is you then have to manually load the apps later, and if there are a lot then remembering them all is a pain. Similarly you could write an Automator script to do the job, but you don’t need to thanks to Delayed Launcher.

Delayed Launcher is a simple free application that lets you do what it says on the can… delay the launching of chosen programs. By transferring applications that launch on startup from your Login Items list to Delayed Launcher, you can speed up your Macs boot time and then just let Delayed Launcher kick off your essential apps a bit later when things have quietened down. The premise is simple, you add your application to the Delayed Launcher list and specify how many seconds you want to wait before launching it. How simple is that?

There's the left way... and the right way

First thing to do is to add Delayed Launcher itself to the end of your Login Items list. Right, the delay you specify on the very first item in the Delayed Launcher list is how long Delayed Launcher waits after it starts before launching your first application. In my example you will see that Xmarks for Safari is the first item in the list and has a value of 30 in the Delay column, meaning that when Delayed Launcher starts up then the first thing it will do is wait 30 seconds before launching Xmarks for Safari. Once it’s done that, it moves on to the next item in the list and again waits for the specified number of seconds before doing so. In my list you’ll see iDeskCal as the next entry in the list with a Delay value of 15. This means that after Xmarks for Safari has been launched, Delayed Launcher waits for 15 seconds before launching iDeskCal. That’s pretty much all you need to know, Delayed Launcher just works its way down your list waiting for the specified time before launching each item, and when it gets to the end of the list is waits a further 5 seconds before it closes itself down.

It’s all very civilized and you don’t have everything under the sun fighting to load itself up as soon as you boot your Mac, meaning you can get on with doing what you want to do sooner rather than getting the spinning beachball trying to load something while your Mac is struggling to load all your Login Items in the background. I should also mention that there’s a ‘pause’ facility, so while Delayed launcher is working its way down the list, you can pause the process and then un-pause it when you want to carry on.

Now there is a gotcha – isn’t there always… It’s not a problem with Delayed Launcher as such, but more the way in which apps that want to load on startup actually configure themselves. Let’s take Default Folder X as an example. It’s a great little app that enhances your file load/save dialogue windows under OS X. One of the options in Default Folder X is for it to launch automatically when you login (i.e. when you boot your Mac). So, you check that option and Default Folder X adds itself to your Login Items list, as you’d expect. Now you decide that you’d like to move it to your Delayed Launcher list so that it can be loaded a few minutes after you login instead. You remove it from Login Items and add it to Delayed Launcher and the next time you boot up all is well as Default Folder X gets launched by Delayed Launcher after the specified interval. That was easy… but wait. Next time you boot up, Default Folder X gets launched straight away even though Delayed Launcher hasn’t even got to it yet. Well that’s because Default Folder X has added itself back to your Login Items list and the reason is that because you configured it to launch on login, it goes and checks the Login Items list and finding it not there, it adds itself back. This isn’t the fault of Default Folder X, it’s doing exactly what you’ve asked it to do. Still, the workaround is easy – for any application that you can configure to launch at login, and that you want to move to Delayed Launcher instead, just un-check the launch/enable at login/startup option in the application itself. Job done.

There are of course a few applications that don’t give you that level of control and that will add themselves to the Login Items list whatever you do. The iTunes Helper app is a good example. Unfortunately you just have to leave them there as that’s how they work. But for those apps that will let you move them from Login Items to Delayed Launcher successfully, here’s a tip to make moving them easy…

Right click the app in your Login Items list and choose Reveal in Finder.

A Finder window will open with the chosen application highlighted.

Now simply drag the highlighted app on to the Delayed Launcher window.

Configure how many seconds delay you want before the app is launched.

Remove the app from your Login Items list.

Remember to tick the ‘Hide’ box in Delayed Launcher if it was ticked in the Login Items list.

There you have it. You can now boot your Mac and have it ready to do whatever you want to do more quickly, while all the other paraphernalia gets launched in the background – when you’re good and ready.

Delayed Launcher is free, and I couldn’t find a donate button in the help or on the Tao Effect website, but if you try Delayed Launcher and like it, then why not write about it, tweet about it or generally help get the message out there.

The other day I invited some friends round. I cooked them a nice meal and we enjoyed drinks and a movie, then as the hour became late we said our goodbyes promising to catch up again soon. I didn’t realize quite how soon though… The following day I was working at home as I usually do, when I heard a noise downstairs. On investigating I found that my new friends had let themselves in, were helping themselves to my snacks and were watching a movie on my TV, using my electricity and generally making themselves at home.

Now you might think this is a bit off. It’s one thing to invite your friends round when you’re ready to entertain and give your house over to them, but it’s another thing entirely if they abuse that trust and without so much as a “Please may I…” they just do as they please with your place. Well if like me you’ve tried Google Chrome, then you’ve got these same friends as well!

You see a while ago I installed Google Chrome after reading how quick it is, and how it makes Firefox (my current browser of choice) look like some lardy pizza shop owner. Indeed Chrome does feel quite sprightly, and I must say I do like the Speed Dial extension, which looks far superior to its Firefox counterpart. However what I didn’t realize when I installed Chrome, and which is probably buried in the small print somewhere, is that Chrome will run a process on my Mac even when Chrome itself isn’t even running. It’s called KSURL and at least four times a day it will attempt to call home, presumably to see if there’s a new version of Chrome or some other Google component that needs updating.

In fact, had it not been for Little Snitch blowing the whistle on ksurl, I would never even have known that it was running and helping itself to my Mac’s CPU and memory resources. You see up popped a warning that process ‘ksurl’ was trying to connect to a Google web address (cache.pack.google.com), but looking in Activity Monitor there was nothing, not even when I chose to view all processes rather than just my own. So, even though Chrome isn’t even running, some process has been spawned by installing Chrome, that periodically runs and calls home to see if there’s an update. Ok, the resources used by this process are probably tiny, but that’s not the point. It’s the fact that the authors of Google Chrome decided to let it behave like this – basically to run on your Mac without your knowledge or permission.

Now I’ve got quite a few applications on my Mac that check for updates and the accepted way seems to be a preferences setting that says ‘Automatically check for updates on start-up, or daily, or whatever’. Basically when you run the app then with your permission the first thing it does is to check to see if there’s a newer version of itself. Why isn’t that good enough for Google Chrome? Why do they have to be sneaky about it? Sure there’s a, ‘Update now’ button on the About Chrome dialogue, but if Chrome is constantly checking for updates in the background, then what’s the point? Imagine if every single app you installed on your Mac took the same approach – you could have potentially hundreds of background processes always running, always calling home, always consuming your precious resources.

Now it just remains for me to find the process that triggers these ‘ksurl’ warnings in Little Snitch, so that I can kill it off.

Well the last three months got pretty hectic both in and out of work which didn’t leave much time for keeping Macbitz up to date. Nevertheless the Mac world moves on and there’s new Mac hardware and software that I’ve purchased and can bore you all to tears with! I will try and get around to writing up more detailed thoughts and reviews in the coming months, but here’s what I’ve been buying (or had bought for me)…

A new Panasonic TX-L32V10B 32″ TV. It’s full HD (1080p and 24fps), has an ethernet port in the back but more importantly has a PC socket on the back. What better than to plug my Mac Mini into it!

An Apple Airport Express which is daisy-chained off my Airport Extreme upstairs in the study so that I can extend the network downstairs.

A Sony PS3 Slim that can talk to my Mac Pro via a couple of bits of software.

A copy of Blue Harvest that helped me with a problem with a BMW 120d !? Yes that’s a BMW car/automobile (depending on where you live).

Socialite – a great client for pulling your social networks (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and other feeds together.

Busy Cal and Spanning Sync for lots of juicy calendar goodness. That’s seamless calendaring between the Mac, Google and my iPhone with a bit of Entourage thrown in for good measure.

Songbird is helping to remove some of the frustrations of iTunes. Plus BeaTunes and Song Sergeant have been doing sterling service.

I’m having fun with a Canon DMC FZ28 camera and a copy of PhotoShop Elements 8 for the Mac.

Yep is helping me organize all those paper documents I scanned using my ScanSnap S300M.

Some neat iPhone apps that I actually use.

There’s bound to be other stuff that I’ve forgotten for now, but will dig out and scribble about on MacBitz in the coming weeks and months. So a Happy New Year to everyone and may your ‘twenty ten’ be a good one. PS – I didn’t even mention the rumoured Apple Tablet once…. doh, I just did!

This is going to be an interesting test of whether I prefer creating my blog entries online in the WordPress interface or in the latest version of Red Sweater’sMarsEdit application. I have to admit I’ve got used to the WordPress interface since I’ve been blogging, and the fact that you can arrange text around your images so that it all looks seamless is a real plus point for me. Also, as I currently only blog from a Mac Pro, then I’m always online, so access to the WordPress interface is easy.

So what’s the interest in MarsEdit? Well I plan on buying a MacBook (some day) and I’d like to be able to travel about and perhaps update my blog as and when I feel like it, without an internet connection in sight – sort of roaming reporter style. Given that I’ve got rid of my car and will be relying on either my bicycle or public transport to get around, it’ll be nice to be able to create content for my blog while sitting on the train for example.

I have pitched right in and am writing this entry directly in MarsEdit so we’ll see how it pans out. First up, it’s rich text I’m after. I want to make the words Red Sweater bold in the first paragraph. In WordPress you get a WYSIWYG editor, so it’s simply a case of highlighting the text and clicking on the ‘B’ icon. Here it’s much the same, just highlight the text, go to the Markup dropdown and choose bold from the list. Ok, MarsEdit isn’t WYSIWYG with the default setting of BBEdit as the editor, so instead of seeing the word change to bold type in the editor, you just see the HTML tags around the word. Having said that, with the Preview window open, you get to see the results straightaway – I can live with that, in fact I might even prefer it. You can choose from a selection of other editors like WriteRoom etc., so there’s flexibility in there.

The second thing I wanted to try out is adding an image. I’ll start out with Red Sweater’s logo, aligning it to the top left of my post and letting text flow around it to the right. Here goes… place the cursor where I want the image to go, click on the Media button, drag the logo image into the Media Manager window, choose the alignment and click Upload & Insert. There, what could be easier? Ok, I’m missing the padding that the WordPress editor puts around an image, so the ‘r’ or Sweater rides up against the text of the article, but hey it’s not bad for a first attempt. I dare say as long as I know what the HTML tags are for doing it I’ll be able to sort that out. Actually that’s a good point – using MarsEdit may take a little extra effort initially but I expect the plus side of having all these HTML tags floating before your eyes is that you can tweak it quite easily if you have the know how.

Right, the next test will be a little trickier. I want to add a screen grab around about the third paragraph, have it aligned over to the right, and make it a bit smaller than real life. Here goes…. Ok, first reaction is yikes! My preview window is showing a huge image bisecting my post. However, I can see a width=904 tag and a height=681 tag, so my initial thoughts are that if I reduce those values to 25% of what they are, I’ll get an image reduced in size accordingly. Ok, so change 904 to 226 and 681 to 170 and… yep, that did it. Ok, in the WordPress editor you can choose from four preset sizes and you can resize dynamically with a drag ‘handle’, but this still seems perfectly workable.

Right, I have two tests left. First is to add a hyperlink to the word MarsEdit in the first paragraph, so you can jump to the product page easily (aren’t I good to you). Second test will be to publish this little effort. Ok, I’ve already copied the link to the clipboard, so let’s go and highlight the word and see what the Markup menu has to offer… ah, Paste Link did exactly what I wanted, turning the word MarsEdit into a clickable link. I’m almost there, just have to choose a few categories and publish it. Picking the categories is just a case of ticking the ones you want seeing as MarsEdit has already downloaded my ones from WordPress – ok that’s done. Finally, the Send to Weblog icon looks like just what I’m after, so in a few minutes this little effort will be visible to the whole world.

I have to say my first experience of MarsEdit has been a positive one. Everything seems inuitive, and while I may not have been as creative with this post as I have been with others, well it’s a start. When I do finally get my MacBook I think I’ll be buying a copy of MarsEdit to use as an offline editor. The learning curve may be a bit steeper that the WYSIWYG editor WordPress now gives you, but the freedom of creating blog content on the go is quite appealing – just need to save for the MacBook first!

Click to enlarge...

Addendum – I’m editing this post in the WordPress editor now as I’ve got one observation to make. The screengrab I added above and reduced to 25% of its size doesn’t have a link to the full sized version of the image, which is what you get by default when using the WordPress editor (see the example at the start of this paragraph). This may be as simpe a finding some setting or option in MarsEdit so I’ll have a look. Still, not bad for a first attempt eh?